Come along virtually with the Baker Family as they live the cruising chapter of their lives!

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The LIST

We have successfully lived on our boat for 3 months now. It has definitely become our home. We are very ready to be relieved of the responsibility of our house!!! Though we do miss our neighbors, we have new neighbors who are great. There is a real sense of community on the dock and it is shared by all.But I digress, the original purpose of this post was the LIST. In about 5 months, we should be headed South. As you can imagine, there is a significant amount of preparation involved in undertaking an adventure like this. In my life, pretty much anytime there is more than 3 things for me to remember I must write them down. Well, preparing the boat and ourselves has a few more than 3 things to do in preparation, so we started a list.Ready or not, Brad had the advantage (or disadvantage) of delivering the boat home to Seattle from Hawaii last summer. The Cordill's had sailed it north from New Zealand, so Brad figured, CAPAZ had come that far, she could probably make it the rest of the way. Fortunately, he was correct and got quite a little shake cruise on which he was able to identify many things to which attention should be paid before we take off.We sat down one afternoon in August with an Excel spreadsheet created a list and categorized and prioritized all the items. Thus, the LIST was born. The good news is that in the intervening 7 months we have made significant progress o most of the major items. There are two fairly major items left (three if you ask me) and a couple that are in process and just need to be finished. This winter's financial crisis did slow us down a little, but Brad has been good about focusing on smaller, time- (not money-) intensive items.When we made the LIST, the sky was the limit. We put everything we could think of on it. Some of the non-essential wish things have fallen to the very bottom of the list and may never get marked off.Being able to focus on just work and the boat once our house sells should speed up the progress of things being completed on the LIST. There are also things on the LIST that can and will probably be completed en route. You know the old saying: Cruising is just routine maintenance is exotic location. Whatever "they" say, I can hardly wait!Next thing to work on from the LIST: Get the mainsail and mizzen back on the boat. One more item to check off!!!!